ROXAL aims to cut lead times with the Bolt pro

Background

Sander Mutsaers, general manager at Roxal Nederland BV has only a few requirements when he is about to make a tooling purchase. These requirements are quality, ease of use and finally great after purchase support. Roxal Nederland B.V. produces an array of different products; from digital information terminals for Utrecht University to high-quality installments for the Rijksmuseum.

Source: Roxal.com “Rijksmuseum display piece”

The jobs require different disciplines and tools during the development process. The usual methods such as injection modeling and CNC machining, though accurate are subtractive in practice. In other words, they produce waste and suitable mainly for final product manufacturing. Additionally, for complex designs, the machining process requires accurate preprogramming on the machine which requires time. Further still, many complex models will require multiple machining runs in order to get the correct final design.

The challenge and the solution

Roxal needed to be able to rapidly test different component configurations and proof of concepts constantly. Due to the fast-paced need for redesigns and iterations, Roxal realized they needed a tool to improve their prototyping process and to increase efficiency. Mr Mutsears had already heard about Leapfrog 3D printers from our various marketing efforts. After understanding the Bolt Pro’s capabilities, he quickly signed up and purchased a Bolt Pro.

Although being a simple standard object in the modern world, the difficulty of producing one model is the expense. His standard production methods would have taken weeks to produce such a model. With the Bolt Pro, Mr Mutsears can produce the model with two materials in-house quickly at a fraction of the cost.

The Bolt Pro gives organizations versatility and options in production. This is another case of the value that additive manufacturing can bring to any industry.

Conclusion

The Bolt Pro is the flagship 3D printer from Leapfrog. They designed it specifically to tackle bottlenecks that arise in product development and testing. The challenges that Roxal faced were that they needed to produce rapid prototypes but were hindered by the standard methods which were expensive according to Mr Mutsaers. The astronomical pricing of producing a standard CAD model that was no bigger than a coffee cup could take weeks and the cost could not be justified. A challenging example of this was Roxal needed to quickly fabricate a model wheel which requires two materials to print. The wheel model included both the rubber and a rim.

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